The Digg Mafia Turning Users Away? Digg Failing? Let’s digg a Little Deeper…

Posted in Demography, Technology on February 18th, 2007

A recently Dugg (and then buried) post by Ajay over at Techtities.com draws attention to a recent fall in traffic to Digg.com. He essentially, declares the sky falling on Digg. Apparently, Kevin Rose must do something “before the Digg Mafia drive away all the normal users.” Eek.

While I have my own concerns about Digg, let’s take a closer look at the data. As Ajay points out, there does appear to be a bit of a drop off.

Now, let’s dig a little deeper…

Oh Look, del.icio.us is experiencing the same trend! Oh look, craigslist.org is experiencing almost exactly the same trend line!

Digg is hardly driving away users. Whatever is going on, it’s broader than Digg.

Plausible Explanations:

• While Digg’s demographics are generally broad and continuing to diversify, I’d argue that Digg’s most active contributors are students (not just undergrads) and others in academia. November, December and January are months particularly packed with exams and vacation days.
• These are holiday months. Every year the web experiences traffic lows during these months, when people are visiting with family, doing their X-mas shopping, tending to end of year closings and attempting to honor their New Years resolutions.
• Alternatively, perhaps Alexa is re-weighting their user base to reflect changing web demographics.

One final consideration: If you look at the very tail end of the graph, at least for now, it looks like Digg and these other sites are prepping to bounce back.

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